Exploring Linux Command‐Line Tools
Christine Bresnahan, Richard Blum · 2019
This chapter focuses on a few basic commands as well as fundamental shell concepts. While it is highly likely that you have had multiple exposures to many of the commands in this chapter, you may not know all of them, and there may be some shell commands you are using in an ineffective manner. Before we look at shells, an important topic to discuss is distributions (also called distros). Although it is tempting to think that Linux distributions are all the same and only a few differences exist between them. After you install your Linux system or virtual environment distro, set it up, and boot it, you can typically reach a command-line terminal by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+F2 key combination (which gets you to the tty2 terminal), and log in using a standard user account (one without super user privileges). Typically, you create a standard user account when installing a Linux distribution. Files on a Linux system are stored within a single directory structure, called a virtual directory. The virtual directory contains fi les from all the computer's storage devices and merges them into a single directory structure. This structure has a single base directory called the root directory, often simply called root.